Ask HN: Do you work with a “hands-on” VP/CTO? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you work with a “hands-on” VP/CTO?

>500-employee company, 100 of those in engineering/IT roles.

Both CTO and VP are "hands-on" meaning they will get into the nitty gritty details of how we develop software or deploy infrastructure.

No roadmap to be seen. No high-level goal. No security policy in place. No offboarding process. No onboarding policy. No central auth server. A few different job schedulers. Few different container orchestration solutions. etc

My theory: they got promoted pushed to management roles (first as founder becoming CTO, then manager becoming VP) and now the salary is too high to go back.

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700 person company, half of which are software engineers. Yes our CTO is extremely hands on, and one of the most insanely gifted developers I've ever met. He was the first hire at the company and has led engineering since.

This works as he is a strong, opinionated, intelligent, yet empathetic person who leads the charge on our engineering standards from the front line. He and the org have realised the problems that come with this approach, so have a head of engineering and the engineering leadership board (including the CTO) that fulfill the other functions of a CTO, such as the people management, resource planning, general process and procedure.

This leads to a great situation where we have a gun of a technical hands on CTO that rallies the troops, but the other typical CTO functions aren't neglected either

Sadly it sounds like your options are to leave or to stop caring so hard about your job. I wish I had better advice, I am also familiar with micromanagers who make bad macro decisions. They are too into how work makes them feel. Some people actually enjoy sitting in meetings and watching people carry out their arbitrary commands, because it makes them feel powerful. On the other hand they don’t enjoy asking whether the way they are spending their time is useful, probably because it would make their entire self-worth collapse.

>No roadmap to be seen. No high-level goal. No security policy in place. No offboarding process. No onboarding policy. No central auth server. A few different job schedulers. Few different container orchestration solutions. etc

Have you asked about these things? Maybe they are there, just not visible to you. A 500-employee company is pretty big already.

Engineering is only 100 people or so. I've been here for a while, there are no such things. Unless they're making a point to exclude it from me only, for years.

> 500-employee company, 100 of those in engineering/IT roles.

> No security policy in place.

How is that possible? Are you saying there's no security policy or a minimal security policy? I can't imagine how a company gets to 500 employees without a single security incident that forces your hand to create some kind of formal policy.

Let's be honest, Enterprise sales companies have to get a soc2 or equivalent. Otherwise, if your customers aren't asking for it, it's easy to go without. Especially at under 1000 people. I've worked at companies with ~200 employees that didn't have a security policy and were incredibly insecure. 500 is typically when b2c will start thinking about security programs, but the reality is that unless security is revenue generating it becomes incredibly hard to build out security policies

A 500 person thats missing what you've posted -> they're in trouble.

Even a 50 person company without that is in for a bad time.

Do they have good advisors?

Is your company on auto-pilot and making good money? If not, sounds like it's going to crash and burn.

It's funny that you mention this because yes, it is on auto-pilot and making good money. The costs of maintaining systems is slowing growing. If it crashes it will be in the long run. Meanwhile, it's a bit depressing in certain ways.

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